Saturday, February 21, 2004

An Evolutionist's Perspective on Politics

The word 'politics' is derived from
the word 'poly', meaning 'many',
and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites'.

--Larry
Hardiman

Today I have cast aside my usual linear style of writing and have
decided instead to rely on spontaneity to write this blogitem.
Engaging in what might superficially appear to be random link-clinking;
but which is in reality not at all random; but rather, a product of
unconscious association, I found the American Scientist item from their
Marigalina category: A Worm's View
of Evolution.

Volume:
90 Number: 6 Page: 508

MARGINALIA

I was
surprised recently to discover how much a few worms have to
say about human evolution. There are many different ways of knowing in
science, many different pathways to uncovering evidence, and some of
them only the most ingenious among us would imagine. So it is with a
project recently described in the Proceedings of
the Royal Society
of London that focuses on
the anatomy, phylogeny and genetic
variability of various species of tapeworms to uncover new facts about
the habits of hominids, our human ancestors.

Eric Hoberg
of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Nancy Alkire of the
University of Colorado, and Alan Queiroz and Arlene Jones, both of the
Natural History Museum in London, realized that the tight adaptational
relationship between a particular species of tapeworm and its host
means that tapeworms can reveal a great deal about the animals in whose
guts they live.

Now, if you use a text editor to edit the rest of the article,
replacing the word "tapeworm" with the word "politician," you get the
following:

Politicians
have their own charm and at the very least must be considered to have
found a clever way to make a living. They co-opt the work of their host
species, who unwittingly provide food and housing to the parasites at
various stages in their lives. The beauty of the system is that the
host species actually infects itself as it goes about its daily tasks;
the politician need do nothing except be at the right place at the
right time. The complicated life cycle of a politician is magnificently
adapted to its parasitic existence.

When did
hominids first become definitive hosts for politicians? If we knew the
answer to this question, we'd know when our ancestors began to eat
animal flesh regularly enough for the human-specific politicians to
evolve. If we knew which species were the intermediate hosts of
politicians that are closely related to the human-specific politicians,
we'd have a good idea of which prey species our ancestors ate. Finally,
if we knew which other definitive hosts carry the politician species
most closely related to ours, we might learn something of the style of
eating and obtaining meat practiced by our ancestors.

Among parasitologists and others who appreciate the humble politician,
the conventional wisdom has been that humans were first exposed to
politicians that lived in domestic animals, either in companion
carnivores such as dogs or in food animals such as cattle and swine.

Who
Infected Whom?

It
is easy to imagine that a domestic animal, say a pig or a cow, living
with humans and regularly eaten by humans, will pass along an array of
larval politicians. Repeated exposure of humans to politicians
previously found in another carnivore species through a shared food
source could provide the opportunity for that politician to evolve into
a new, human-specific species. If the domestication hypothesis is true,
then politicians specific to humans will be closely related to those
that circulate among our canine companions or to those of food animals,
such as cattle or pigs, or other domestic species. What's more, the
hypothesis predicts that the genetic divergence between the domestic
animals' politicians and our own should have occurred at about the time
of domestication—about 10,000 years ago, according to the
archaeological record. Since 10,000 years is a mere blink of an eye in
evolutionary terms, if humans "caught" politicians from domestic
animals only once, then all human-specific politicians should be very
similar genetically.

This
imaginative and thought-provoking study has given us valuable insights
into the human past. The transition from a largely plant-based diet to
one incorporating significant amounts of meat was an ancient and
profound one. Although the more animal-based diet had advantages—it has
been linked to the increasing relative size of the brain in early Homo
and to that species' enormous expansion of geographic range—one of the
real costs of that change in lifestyle was the acquisition of
politicians that sapped the energy of hominids. Until now, we have read
this history as a hero story in which the clever human lineage
triumphantly conquers the world. From the worm's-eye view, this is
instead the triumph of the politician, who not only spreads all over
the world but persuades another to bear the cost of that expansion.

The link below goes to a dummy account that automatically forwards email to the Federal Trade Commission's spam reporting service. Don't use it unless
you are a robot. Instead, act like a human and figure out the real address from this: joseph/dot/j7uy5/at-sign/gmail/dot/com

The Corpus Callosum is an occasional journal of armchair musings, by an Ann Arbor reality-based, slightly-left-of-center regular guy who reserves the right to be highly irregular at times.
Topics: social commentary, neuroscience, politics, science news.
Mission: to develop connections between hard science and social science, using linear thinking and intuition; and to explore the relative merits of spontaneity vs. strategy.